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Why Cloud Vendors Must Make the Service Side of SaaS a Priority

Why Cloud Vendors Must Make the Service Side of SaaS a Priority

We examine the often-forgotten "S" in SaaS—service—and explore steps the cloud community can take to improve its customer experience.

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Publishing High-Level Roadmaps Further in Advance

Customers want to understand how their business will be impacted by future upgrades, including how the technology can evolve to better serve their business needs.

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Roll Out Test Systems Well Ahead of a Production Release

Cloud vendors should use their customer base as trusted partners in developing their technology, ensuring that future releases both meet customer needs and include high-quality, hardened technology.

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Deliver Release Documents Two Months Prior to Each Release

Some users can experience difficulties keeping up with the pace of a fast-moving SaaS release cycle. While many vendors are overly focused on feature improvements, it's essential that any new features be adequately and appropriately communicated to the customer base.

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Improve and Simplify Integrations

A SaaS innovation is useless if a customer cannot integrate the technology into their existing infrastructure or if they're required to rip and replace other existing systems in order to make the technology work.

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Improve Uptime

As cloud technology has improved, unintended downtime can signify the end of a customer relationship, and planned downtime must be communicated well in advance, with proper precautions taken to ensure a minimal disruption in service.

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Reprioritize Tickets Based on Business Criticality

A service team must be able to prioritize critical issues immediately and communicate effectively to use existing knowledge of past customer issues to solve important problems as fast as possible.

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Invest in the Training and Implementation Capabilities From Partners

In many industries, a large ecosystem of integration partners is available that can help your team keep customers satisfied. Cloud providers cannot work in silos; they must better leverage this community so that all parties can help provide a quality customer experience.